this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
52 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

44902 readers
747 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hi all!

I have decided to setup and selfhost my own private Lemmy instance.

I will be doing with docker (podman, actually).

Should I host at home or use a dedicated VPS?

Anybody selfhosting its own Lemmy?

Do you guys have any hints for me?

top 15 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Advice: make sure you deploy the latest version of Lemmy! The newest one solves a lot of federation/backend stuff (hint hint Lemmy.world).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Ok, indeed, will go with latest for sure, thanks

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You might be interested in our Podman quadlet scripts then: https://f-hub.org/Solarpunk/lemmy-podman

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Thank you! This is really interesting, will look into it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If you have less than 10 or so users, id say go ahead and self host. It's not terribly resource intensive at least not on my personal instance. I use it to test posts, solutions that will eventually make it's way into a pr, or just experiments and that can (and does) run on a pi.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Thanks! I have a more powerful hardware than a pi, how is it about bandwidth?

I will have two, maybe three users.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Not too much. I don't have specific stats but there's not much video being shared. We are not at the level where it takes too much bandwidth.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Very very little. It's a billion tiny little bits of text, and if you have image caching enabled, then all those thumbnails.

My personal instance doesn't cache images since I'm the only one using it (which means a cached image does nobody any good), and i use somewhere less than 20gb a month, though I don't have entirely specific numbers, just before-lemmy and after-lemmy aggregates.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Shortcut: use Tailscale to create your own private network and avoid hosting on the big, bad Internet. Otherwise, you really have to be careful on how you protect your services.

Minor downside (or upside) is that you'll have to install the Tailscale app on each device you want to make part of the network.

This made hosting at home a lot easier for me.

Update: Ah! I misread the post. Tailscale doesn't make sense for this use case. My bad! 😅

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

A lemmy instance hosted behind Tailscale would be unable to federate, no?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Yeah, you're right. Bad advice actually. Oops.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thank you, I am allergic to tailscale (joking).

I already selfhost lots of stuff for family and friends using reverse proxy+https a public domain(s) and a VPS tunneled back (wireguard) home since I am behind CGNAT. And authelia on top of it all.

My setup should be safe enough also for a Lemmy instance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If you haven't seen it, headscale is an open source controller for tailscale clients. Assuming your allergies are related to using their public offering.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I have heard of headscale, and agree that would fix my allergies.

But I don't have a use case for that either, so...

Maybe in the future, who knows.